As Kathy Shaidle of Five Feet of Fury says, now here's an apology for slavery that I can really get behind:
"Traditional African rulers should apologise for the role they played in the slave trade, a Nigerian rights group has said in a letter to chiefs."
" 'We cannot continue to blame the white men, as Africans particularly the traditional rulers, are not blameless,' said the Civil Rights Congress. "The letter said some collaborated or actively sold off their subjects."
"...on behalf of the buyers of slaves, the ancestors of these traditional rulers 'raided communities and kidnapped people, shipping them away across the Sahara or across the Atlantic'."
The complicity of Africans in the African slave trade goes unstated in the calls for slavery reparations here in the U.S. Nor is there any mention of the extensive Arab slave system, which lasted longer than the European and American involvement in the slave trade and involved millions more AFrican slaves.
In general, I'm against apologizing for what happened in the past. It was a different time, cultures and norms and laws were different. No doubt, in 50 or 100 years, we'll look back at something we're doing today and be appalled.
Apologies are irrelevant. Why not put that energy into stopping modern slavery? There's still plenty of that around.
BBC News has a series of links to mark the 200th anniversary of Britain's abolition of the slave trade.
Comments